


Flight of Regardless Feelings

by orphan_account



Category: Yes (Band)
Genre: Drinking, Infidelity, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-05
Updated: 2013-01-05
Packaged: 2017-11-23 17:43:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/624852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The beginning of the end has been coming for a long time. (1979)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flight of Regardless Feelings

He’s taken up drinking. Not just at parties, not just with the rest of the band. Jon drinks, and he drinks and he drinks and he drinks. When he’s sober, he’s ashamed of it, because he knows how much of a lightweight he is. It takes one shot for him to get giggly and flushed, two to nearly pass out in a thin puddle of his own tears. It’s because of how things are going in the studio, and on the tours, and at home. Because, really, by now they’re all the same thing. He wakes up in the same state of undress curled up within Chris’ arms every morning, but the heat between them turns into a shouting match more often than it does a clash of lips on lips. They make up in time to get to the studio, but it resurfaces in the presence of Rick and Alan and Steve, who all jump in as referees and only wind up tag team partners. Everyone leaves scowling. Jon says he’ll meet Chris at home, and he goes out and drinks.

He’s not alone, though. Rick has been drinking for the better part of thirteen years or something else absurd. He’s got such a resistance to the alcohol that even when he’s had thrice as much as Jon, he can still act as their designated driver and the police don’t suspect a thing. And since their disillusionment has somehow ended up on the same side of the coin, they make a solid pair. Jon can sip his way into a slurring, teary treatise on what went wrong, and when, and where, and how, and why, and Rick can chug back gallons and agree. And they can end the night leaning on each other, propping each other upright, sometimes lacing their hands together, because the extra balance is necessary, and they can embrace for longer and longer each night.

One night Jon leans back so far in his seat he risks falling backward, but he never does, if only by virtue of how little he weighs. He has his arms spread on the table and he grasps the far ends of it with his hands. He anchors his chin to the surface. He’s knocked over his glass with his teeth, but thankfully he’d already finished it off. He looks at Rick through the warped glass and says, “This isn’t the band I wanted to be in.”

Rick offers an air toast. “Welcome to me, five years ago.”

“This isn’t how I wanted things to _end_.” Jon rolls his head to one side, soft cheek collapsing like a heavy pillow against the table.

A jukebox plays something or another in the corner and the other drunks hoot and holler amongst themselves. But between the two of them, there is silence. Together they are like the underbelly of a capsized canoe roiling in the storm waves of a lake. Neither has to say what ‘things’ have to end for Rick to say, “Well, sometimes it has to, believe you me,” and for Jon to shiver under the force of some kind of breath interruption, a hiccup or a silencing of a drunken sob.

“Hey,” Rick says, reaching a hand out to ruffle Jon’s hair. Perhaps it’s the booze, but he thinks that it’s been getting curlier lately, somehow. He bets it’s the booze. Either way, it’s soft, and a little wet, and his fingers loiter with dark strands looped around them. “Hey, no.”

Jon lifts his hand and claps it down atop Rick’s and holds it there. He whimpers. “I can’t go home tonight. Noooo. No.”

“You know what, you ever wanna—you ever wanna talk to anyone,” Rick says, stammering half to reinforce the point, like every repeated syllable is one slat of an awning, and half because it’s always his mouth that falls victim to the alcohol before anything else. “I’m gonna—it’s me. You come to me. We’re _friends,_ Jon.”

“Best friends,” Jon repeats, quietly, still holding Rick’s hand on his head. His grip has wavered a bit, allowing only for Rick’s hand to slide onto Jon’s cheek, but neither of them bothers to correct the positioning. “Best best best best friends. Mmm.”

The two of them are in no state to think it strange the kind of lens beer can cast on the light, barely perceptible rub of a thumb against a cheek, or on the extension of a tiny foot to search under a table until it collides with a shin, or on the wriggle of a set of fingers that curl around the back of an ear. But a moment later Rick gets up from his seat, hoists Jon up onto his shoulder, and carries him out of the bar. He barely wavers on his feet. Jon moans a little in feigned protest, but mostly he grasps at the fabric of Rick’s shirt or at the ends of his hair, which he realizes, if only in blurry twinkles, he’s never really touched before, or that he’s always sort of wanted to. He leans across the whole front of the car for the entire ride to Rick’s house, his head on Rick’s shoulder, reaching up to toy with his hair. “You’re made out of gold, Ricky,” he says.

It’s the kind of thing Jon would say whether or not he’d had anything at all to drink. But Rick says, “And you went and pants—panted—panned for me,” and they both roll back a solid twenty years in age for laughing.

“I’m drunk,” Jon insists, at the end of his laughter, at the end of the ride. He repeats it again and again when Rick picks him up and carries him into the house and up to his bedroom. And then he giggles and repeats ‘pants’ again when the garments in question come off, and so does Rick, and the laugher turns to sighs, then moans, then cries, and in the morning, when they peel away from each other and slip back into yesterday’s clothes so Rick can take Jon home, nothing is quite as funny anymore.


End file.
